Sidewalk Living

Thanks to reductions in my electric and cellular bills, I’ve got a little more wiggle room in my budget, which has resulted in me returning to the occasional trip to a coffeeshop to grab a latte and sit outside to read. In a since-deleted note on my homepage, I recently said that I wish I had the energy to do more than watch a lot of television, but the combination of having been able to do an installment plan for a new Kindle and so doing a lot more reading and finding this new room in the budget made me realize that while I don’t have any real increase in physical or psychological resources (and what little I might have found, mostly due to the living space reboot) I’ve dedicated to resuming the daily 1.5-mile walk through the neighborhood), I now had the meager financial capacity to at least get out of the apartment more often. Having remembered that there’s one coffeeshop on the main drag whose storefront is in the midday shade (among my autistic sensory processing difficulties are sensitivities to both light and heat), I’m gradually rediscovering why I prefer to live in a city, even if in one of its outlying neighborhoods formerly a town in its own right. While there are challenges to such sidewalk living—especially when the main drag is in the middle of a very long, intermittently-loud retrofit—you end up spectator to moments like a grizzled and shaggy-bearded man in an SUV ending up in a duet to the song he’s got playing on the radio with a harried-looking woman passerby in a wheelchair whom he doesn’t know.